Saturday, March 31, 2007

At long last my office is being painted and it's the orange that I wanted and, even better, my friend A, pictured here, who I got hired to do the actual work, is sponging over it with white so it looks really super cool. Now I will have no excuse not to clean it all up and then get totally motivated and become a stellar employee.

Except my basic lameness. There's always that.

S had a little party last night and it was tons of fun. Naturally I drank way too much and smoked way too much and then I did a drawing of our friend A which turned out, I thought, kind of weirdly okay for a messed up Friday night drawing. Also, people kept laughing at things I said, which is like crack to me and goes straight to my head and makes me talk too much. I am an attention whore, it is true. This is too bad for my friends but works out okay for me, I guess - anyway, I had fun and I think everyone did. S has an awesome backyard and now that the weather has warmed up it's so nice to sit outside and drink beer and smoke too much.

Now that it's Saturday I sat around and smoked a little with N and then did another drawing which I will post shortly. It's strange and amazing and wonderful to be making art again, effortlessly, like I never stopped for several years. I don't know what switch in my head went on again but I'm really glad it did. I like it when hours of the morning vanish and I suddenly surface with a weird little expressionist view of my backyard or something. It's the way, I think, that I'm supposed to live. Now if only it will rain before I start cleaning up the backyard so I can slack away the rest of the day guilt free, life will be nearly perfect.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Sometimes I think, you know, that a whole day might go by when I didn't have to go to the Haywood Road Ingles. In my dreams, in a kind of lottery winning over the rainbow kind of utopic dream: I don't have to go to Ingles today. Wouldn't that be excellent? Ah, it is but a crazy dream. I must go to Ingles every day; it is required.

Today all I had to get was some dogfood and laundry detergent, because I left the Ingles and did my laundry and in the middle of it went to the Patton Avenue K-Mart, which I refuse to photograph on the grounds that I don't want any suicides hanging over my karma. The Patton Avenue K-Mart is where all hope and dreams come to die. It's the land of sorrow and infinite malaise, and it sells nothing. It sells nothing in fluorescent lit, grungy, unhappy aisles of sad faced children. For example, it sells no ladies' underwear. No, wait it does -it sells the ladies' underwear of the damned. The damned, who, when they're not wearing size 10 white cotten jockey briefs, prefer to wear bright yellow lace trimmed boy shorts with already flaking decals of Winnie the Pooh characters on them. I'm sorry, but I don't want Christopher Robin or his pals anywhere near my hoo-ha. There are limits, and I prefer black.

There are other things the K-Mart doesn't sell, and I found most of them, which was a pity, because I had plans to actually buy things. I did get M some socks. So when I got up to the cashier station I was delighted to find that I had one of those elderly and desperate cashiers, the ones you just know are raising 3 crack addicted grandchildren and still have weird cousin Joe Bob in the shed out back with the meth lab. This cashier had apparently been told that she must follow the K-Mart script and damn, follow it she would, down into hell and back, even as her customers stared at her blankly and thrust ripped packages of beanbag ashtrays into her hands.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Today's image is brought to you by the month of March, the spring, little things that go tweet and so on. Look! There's a nest in my redbud tree. I don't know what kind of nest it is and whether or not there's anything in it - besides bees; there are always a million of bees in the redbud - but it's just so cute. Dumb - it's totally exposed and there are hawks around - but cute. In other cuteness news, Django brought us a large rubber duck today. He knows every way out of the fence (there are many) and he has, apparently, an agenda he follows around the neighborhood every day. Sometimes this agenda involves bringing home new playthings, like a rubber duck. Or a shoe; that's less good. But you never know - I'm living in hope that one day he'll come bounding up onto the couch with a diamond necklace or, less traceable, a nice leather briefcase full of cash.

In keeping with our general theme lately of sex, drugs and what used to be called rock n' roll but is now going by some new name, like Elmer, we've been watching lots of dysfunctional drug movies. Sometimes this is a good thing, because I guess it was high time I finally saw Requiem for a Dream, and then I made it all the way through Naked Lunch this time and actually enjoyed it and we got to see Gothic again, which is just as odd as I remembered, but sometimes it is a very, very bad thing.

A terribly bad thing indeed. Yes. Party Monster is about the worst damn thing I've ever seen and if anyone was in any kind of doubt whether Macaulay Culkin can, in fact, act or do anything much except pose for those vaguely remembered iconic posters with the open mouth and the hands and such that always made me so grateful to god that he wasn't one of my kids, on whom that expression would have earned either a swift slap or a trip to the DNA lab to figure out their actual parentage, well, the question has been answered. He cannot. No, he cannot act his way out of the proverbial paper bag (what the hell does that mean, by the way? How would you act your way out of a paper bag? Emote a la William Shatner all over the place and say LET. ME. OUT. OF. HERE. with great feeling? Take it off your head very slowly with tortured arm motions like interpretive dance? Well, however you would do it, rest assured that it would be better than Macauley Culkin doing it.) and, while he's not acting, the script is busy not making much sense, the club scenes are badly realized and the movie just sucks.

How do I know that the club kid thing is badly done? I know this because I was there. Well, kinda/sorta I was there, inasmuch as I wasn't really a fabulous club kid but instead a) poor, b) female, and c) as always, more interested in cheap booze and good music than fabulousness. I went to Limelight once but I was more a CBGBs performance space/Danceteria before it closed/Max Fish/various dive bars girl than a fabulous club kid party girl. But I could have been. If I had wanted to. Well, okay, I mean, I lived in the East Village and went to gallery openings - it's how I fed my kid once a week - and was friendly with Red Ed, who was this weird guy always dressed completely in red leather who also hung out at gallery openings, and people often gave me invitations which I promptly scrunched into my purse and then threw away weeks later. There may still be some down in there. So I was tangentially a club kid and I totally know that the movie was full of remarkable shit.

Unfortunately, the movie happens to be one of N's favorites. Usually we're in complete accordance on movies except in the horror genre, where his tastes run to psycho slasher gorefests like Saw, which I will not watch, and my tastes run to campy over the top things like Lair of the White Worm, which he will not watch, but there we were, watching a movie he's been bugging me to see for weeks and I hated it. Always an awkward moment: not quite as bad as when your new boyfriend's band sucks, but close. Actually, I'm really surprised that he liked it, given his usual casual homophobia "That is so GAY" commentary, but he says he's secure enough in his own masculinity to watch it. Secure humbug; I think he just wants to put on makeup. I told him this and he kicked me, heh. Therefore it must be true. Still, he was pretty cool about me hating it and now in payback I'm going to get him to watch The Coca Cola Kid which is my personal "nobody else likes it but for some inexplicable reason I always have loved it go figure now you must watch it as well to prove that you do love me" movie.

Also, in other drug movie news, we watched part of Tideland last night, but thank the gods the DVD was all messed up and we only got to see about the first 40 minutes, which I think was quite enough horrific depression for one evening. I'm not even going to ask Orbit for another copy.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

My friend S says my last blog entry sounded like things were bad again and she was all trepidatious about talking to me. Things, actually, are totally fine - I'm just regular normal tired and cranky. Nothing extreme. Nothing scary. Life is good. Life is, in fact, very fucking good, but I'm not talking about all that. However, you know, there are these daily irritations that involve getting up in the morning and going to work and so on and so forth, when one would so much rather be lying around smoking opium and wearing a crepe de chine wrapper and getting the butler to bring one a lovely g & t and some chocolates. One is having an Edwardian moment again and darling, don't we all?

Monday, March 26, 2007

It was a long weird complicated day that had a lot of odd parts. Last night nobody could sleep very well in this house and so there were weird clumping noises all night as one after the other of us blearily made insomniac rounds between the water jug in the kitchen and the bathroom. The dogs next door were uneasy and barked a lot, which is the signal, of course, for our dogs to bark like lunatics and rush to the door and collide with a lot of noisy things in the kitchen. So I was tired all day and sniffly, at least until I got hold of some Sudafed which turns me into some kind of middle eastern Afreet - very dry and sandy but full of whirling energy. Young M called sadly from school to tell me that he was sick and so I had to go pick him up and take him to McDonalds (let us now praise young M! For he has gotten an actual good report card! All hail!) and then home and then I went back to work and then after work things which should have been simple, like going to the store, turned complex. This may have been due to low blood sugar, which always makes me think that I am completely justified in wanting to axe everyone when in actual fact if you just feed me I transform back into that avatar of kindness and humanity - oh, all right, I still want to axe people, just not everyone.

At any rate now I have eaten and taken a somewhat lame picture (I wasn't going to take a picture at all. I was going to take N's suggestion of writing I DON'T WANT TO TAKE A FUCKING PICTURE TODAY on a piece of paper and photographing that but I'm too lame even for that. The Lameness Manifesto: I was going to write it down and shit but all I could find were some broken crayons and a piece of toilet paper.) of the gourd witch head I made last fall who is now a permanent fixture on my front porch, appropriately illuminated by my equally permanent Christmas lights. In other front porch news, I've decided to paint and mosaic Frosty the porch snowman, and that project I think will be entertaining as hell. If the lameness allows me to get around to it, that is.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

85 degrees or something crazy like that and I spent the day desultorily cleaning up the kitchen and taking a nap and reading Kim, which I dug out of my son's bookcase after last night's blog entry. It's amazingly racist yet I do not care, because it's still holding all the magic I remember from it and my childhood, when I wanted to be Kim more than anything else in the world. Except possibly Mowgli who was maybe even cooler than Kim, but even I, not noted for long term thinking, realized that Mowgli was going to have a rough adult life and difficulty adjusting to life beyond wolves. As a former feral child, upper middle class variety, I must attest to this.

Meanwhile, I'm still a little sick, which is a drag. This thing just doesn't want to quite let go. So I'm treating myself with vodka and grapefruit juice and praying to Jah and echinacea and so on, but it's a bit eepy. Which means, I guess, that it's okay that I haven't done much today.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

My friend P, who has been visiting from NY this week, took me out to dinner at Mela tonight. Dinner was fabulous but I feel bad for poor P - he arrived on Monday, got to have one fun night out in Asheville and then his hostess, me, promptly succumbed to the flu and he ended up being sort of farmed off to Bat Cave and beyond. Now that he's going back, of course he's feeling a bit out of it too, so I am probably returning him to the north with a nice case of Asheville flu. Poor P. He will never come back here, I'm sure. Well, mice, men, plans, etc. What can one do?

One can wildly overdo, if one is me, and end up feeling fairly gruesome again. Naturally as soon as I started feeling better yesterday I had to party like a lunatic and then as previously blogged wake up before dawn and then clean the living room completely and go to Lowes and work in the garden and so on, with the predictable result that I'm feeling like I may be vanishing back down the illness rabbit hole again. Gah. Boo. Hiss.

But at least I'm kind of caught up on my picture a day backlog, even if this isn't a prizewinner. Still, I'm a sucker for that dancing shadow - either Krishna or Shiva I think. Making the world or just making it with the cowmaids - Indian deities have more fun. Gods the food was amazing though - I want to move to India; I always have, although I've accepted the likelihood that I probably won't be able to marry Kim (damn) but I'd be happy just to eat Indian food every day for the rest of my life. Yum.

Here is yesterday's picture, of a humongous wasp that was on the inside of Pack Place while I, thankfully, was on the outside. I dragged my sick self to work yesterday, then came home early. Then, last night, naturally I did all the things you're not supposed to do when you're sick. Yes. ALL of them. Every single thing your mother ever told you not to do when you're sick, I did. Except go to Broadways; I didn't do that. If your mother forgot to tell you not to go to Broadways when you're sick, let me tell you now. Don't go to Broadways when you're sick, because simply walking in the door is the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes and then you'll smoke another one while you're there in self defense. However, except for Broadways I did everything bad.

That's probably why today I think I feel fine except for a runny nose. I'm not sure, because for some peculiar reason I've been awake since 4:20 when I came straight up out of some completely inexplicable dream involving my ankle and N and a woolly sock or possibly it was a sheep and couldn't get back to sleep. I've been wandering around the house in a succession of increasingly bizarrre clothes since then, since I'm either too hot or too cold and nothing feels quite right. Also, it's boring around here at 5:30 in the morning and rooting through the piles of clothes in my room is at least something to do. I woke N up for a while but he's gone back to sleep like a sensible person now.

I can't believe it's 9:30 am on a Saturday and I've been awake for five hours. This is ridiculous; I must be turning into my mother, who at this point apparently sleeps for about 2 and a half hours a night. I can't stand it. I don't like being awake in the morning and, if insomnia must hit, why can't it be on a work day for heaven's sake? Maybe I used up my weekly sleep quota on the flu; I did sleep for pretty much three solid days. I hope not though, because I really would like to go back to sleep soon.

Friday, March 23, 2007

I have been dying in bed with the flu since Monday if anyone wondered what had become of me. Each day I managed to barely sit up and take a picture of my surroundings - this one, my bedroom curtains - and then I lay back down again and wished I was dead. It's been truly horrible and even the remarkable fever dreams (102.2 for almost 72 hours straight, mmm hmmm) and all the Nyquil I cared to drink didn't make it any better. I still feel gruesome; I've missed three days of work; I don't even want to glance in a mirror and yet I think I have to go to work today. My house looks like a small thermonuclear bomb went off in it (we live balanced on a tenuous precipiece over the chaos void, and when I give up it all goes kablooie really fast) the dogs are worried, the bathtub drain has quit working altogether and M says that if he's late to first period one more time he'll be suspended. So, you know, business as usual. Argh. I still feel totally horrible but I'm going to get up today and go to work.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

More art. Another oil pastel drawing and this one rather obviously of N, which is weird as hell, since I never, but never, draw my friends or relatives. Most of my art is pretty subconscous - I don't sit down to draw with a plan in mind. I pick up the pencil or the crayons or whatever and let it go from there. This one I had a small idea of daffodils and a certain yellow orange in the lower right hand corner and this is the drawing that resulted. Channeling my brain's worries, I guess.

Kind of a hangover don't do much kind of day today. Last night ended up being so much fun - you see, gentle readers, I have rediscovered praying to Jah as a valid and interesting religious experience and this is actually quite, at the moment, a good thing. But last night all that was combined with, god help me, Jack & Coke (suddenly deciding that you're 23 again has its downsides, like Jack Daniels, which no sane person over the age of 25 touches) and a few beers and so, hangover today and then the obligatory lost drive around Candler looking for young M, which has grown to be a weekend ritual and eventual ending up at Sonic, who, as if I could love them more, have now started serving jalapeno poppers, which are my favorite food group of all time. You have your fried, your cheese, your spicy and your vegetable - it's the perfect food.

And the TV remote has succumbed to dog chewing and making movies work with the minimal, confused buttons on the TV set is problematic. We can only watch old movies with simple menus, which is how tonight, we watched episode one of The Corner (N's favorite book which he gave me to read a couple months ago; horrific, unputdownnable and heartwrenching0 and then Kentucky Fried Movie. Which I'm happy to say is just as funny as it's always been.

St. Patrick's Day yesterday; better known as R's 11th birthday. We went up to Bat Cave for the festivities, which were very festive and rather on the loud side. There were hundreds of little girls - okay, just like four or five, but it seemed like hundreds - and my friend D, R's mother was beginning to get a sort of hunted, desperate expression on her face. "I'm thinking about just yelling at them all randomly," she said, "Why wait until they do something wrong?" Our friends A & N had come down from Baltimore accompanied by the two teenagers K & H and the twins, who are 10 and as always hell on wheels. So it was very nice but we ended up not staying all that long. N found a whole bunch of his old CDs, which made him happy, and we came on home.

Then I went to the flickr meetup, which was still going strong even though I was 2 and a half hours late and then when I came home S came over & N & S & A & J and I sat in front of the fire drinking jack & coke and inhaling and it was actually really fun. Now I have a headache of doom of course but I guess it was kind of worth it. Or not. But lacking a time machine (damn, I want a time machine SO bad sometimes) there's nothing I can do and no way to yell at my last night self to skip the last couple of beers or just stick to water like a smart woman. Alas.

This is Friday's picture, taken on a rainy day standing outside the closed New French bar. The little covered walkway between the New French and the ice cream place is where I go to smoke on rainy days. Actually I ended up inside this bar that night with my friends S & J, which was nice and then eventually back at S' house where we ate bread and cheese and drank beers.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

I went to a real psychiatrist today and got a formal diagnosis of being not crazy, which is nice. Okay, there is more - I'm not bipolar and I'm not crazy but I am depressed and I do have anxiety. I already knew this, of course, but something about sitting answering questions from a psychiatrist as opposed to whining on to oh, my friends and my therapist and so on, makes it more sort of official and it kind of weirded me out. So she gave me a huge old bottle of Lexapro and told me I need to take it every day and stop going on it and off it like a yoyo. Yoyo being my term, not hers, but descriptive and to the point. She wants me to stay on it for six months - we'll see. I'm ambivalent. One might get another boyfriend, you know, and lexapro isn't all that much fun in the bedroom.

She also gave me a prescription for Clonopin for anxiety about which I'm also ambivalent but oddly less ambivalent than I was about the lexapro, which is dumb on my part, since I've done lexapro a million times and have never tried clonopin. But I suppose that's just the allure of a new drug although I'll probably be afraid to take it too and it will join the three year old xanax I've been carrying around in case of emergency since 2004. I've carried that thing through a couple of emergencies and I'm sure it helped. Although, you know, I suppose it's probably more like a diaphragm: doesn't work from your underwear drawer across the bedroom.

In other news. . . there is no other news. We're out of beer and I'm too broke to buy any, ah well. The guys are watching Ghost Dog in the living room and I mopped the floor and it's possible that my friend P from New York is going to come down and visit this weekend. Most of Baltimore is coming down to Bat Cave and that will be nice; a party this weekend.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Why doesn't Asheville have a decent alternative radio station? Preach to me not of WNCW, oh my brothers and sisters, for I have been stalwart and yet finally, the twang and the jazz have defeated me. There is only so much bluegrass anyone can take and my limit has been reached; besides, they play jazz all the damn time now along with that horrific 1940s cowboy music and I can just no longer pretend I'm cool enough to enjoy it. I'm not that cool and I hate jazz. I hate swing even more and fashionable faux swing? First up against the wall when I become the evil overlord. I'm terminally uncool and I want to hear what was called, back in the day, rock n' roll music. All day long at work on the computer I listen to WFUV out of New York and I weep when they play music I can't hear locally and cheer when they play the traffic and weather because, thank the gods, I haven't lived in New York in well over a decade.

Seriously, though, it sucks. I was stuck in traffic on the goddamn McDowell Street bridge for like 15 interminable minutes this evening attempting to go visit my mother and I had a choice of boingety boingety twang twang jazzgrass on WNCW, Behind Blue Eyes on the clone classic hits radio station (Noone knows what it's like to be the sad man. . . yes. Yes they do. All 50 million of them who have been forced to listen to that fucking pathetic song thousands of times over and over on classic "we can't be bothered to own more than 10 CDs" rock radio, corporate whores of the demonocracy) and car ads on the other station. Or jesus. I could always listen to some asshole telling me about jesus, but he doesn't love me and I like it that way, thanks.

To add insult to injury, I dragged all my old cassettes out of the house and back into the car which, among other things, dumped dust and grime all over my black pants, only to discover that the cassette deck makes everything wobble and shake even more heinously than I, no serious audiophile, can stand. I mean, can you believe it? You don't clean a cassette deck for 10 years and then try to play a bunch of crusty 15 year old cheap ass cassettes on it and it's all wobbly? No pride in craftsmanship, I swan. So I'm in the market for a tape deck cleaner; I can so totally imagine how many of those there are around now. If you have one, I need it. I have a Men At Work tape from 1982 that's dying to be heard on Hendersonville Road.

So spring is sort of resoundingly sprung: springily, even. It's 70 outside and the birds are going nuts all over the place, singing and warbling and, in the case of those beloved harbingers of the vernal tides, the redbreasted legends of lore, trying to kill each other messily all over my neighborhood. Well, okay, robins aren't cuckoos, although they are cuckoo, also psychopathic little bastards. I mean, seriously. I always know that this time of year marks that golden week or two when you can see robins fighting to the death like feathered gladiators. It's surprising that any survive to kill again next spring. It's entertaining in a gruesome kind of way, but what always surprises me whenever I start going on (btw ignore the weird comment spam on that post; it just takes too long to delete it bit by bit. Should really do that though. Oh well.) about the generally bloody nature of spring (gotta DIE to be REBORN, sucker) is that this aspect of the calendar year is just not so generally celebrated. One spring I was at a Friends meeting in Chestertown, Maryland and an older lady got up to speak. She said, "When I was a young girl I always dreaded the old ladies who stood up to speak about the spring and the flowers and the birds. Well, now that I'm old, I'd like to talk to you about the spring and the flowers and the birds." It was a good lead in. Mine, which would involve bits of bloody feathers lying around, would also have a good lead, but perhaps not be as, uh, inspirational.

The thing is, though, all that fighting and squawking and egg stealing and snakes waking up from the winter to get hit by cars and so on is inspirational. It's a battle and it's constant and yet, it is rebirth: you've come through the winter, this last terrible March part of winter, beaten and battered and limping, but through and out the other side. Maybe I'll plant a garden again this year after all.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

I took this from under the daffodils in the dark, with a 15 second exposure and then I made it black and white, which use of photoshop crashed the computer (probably should have put CS onto the newer computer, not the older one, huh?) but here it is.

In other news we went out to the Asiana Grand Buffet for dinner which has undone all the good any diet ever did me, also, I may die momentarily for I was unable to resist the raw oysters, even though I know that eating oysters in Asheville is iffy at the best of times and, frankly, the Asiana Grand Buffet on Smoky Park Highway is not the best of times. Although it is kind of fun in a horrid stuff yourself overindulge terrible American gluttony feast kind of way; also, the food is really pretty good, mostly. And I ate a whole bunch of sushi (also high on the sudden death potential - I like to live dangerously,) plus all the stuff that I didn't know what it was. I make a point of always eating the weirdest shit on the buffet, because otherwise maybe they'll get rid of it and I like the freaky pork and shrimp dumplings and the weird flavorless steamed bun things that look like sexual peaches and the tentacley salt and pepper squid. I do not want these things to be entirely replaced by the terrible spectacle of frozen half ears of corn floating in some kind of buttery milk, so I eat them. They're good. And I like eating jello with chopsticks, which is something I learned how to do at Chinese buffets and a skill of which I am proud, even though, actually, I hate jello.

I had a whole poignant and thoughtful fucking blog post worked out in my head about old people's voices and what they say and this really darling old guy at the post office this morning but M is salivating behind me waiting to seize the computer so he can listen to terrorist music and harass people on myspace and, incidentally, kill Nazis with jetpacks. So no heart warming brilliant prose for you this evening - shit happens.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Yup, as always, we're terrorizing the neighbors with our quality selection of high explosives. I put a stop to the bottle rocket fight last night - or at least I halted it temporarily while I got the hell out of Dodge. I find that my son & his friends & I all get along much, much better at fireworks time when I'm about 6 blocks away. Actually, I am guiltily fond of fireworks and loud banging noises myself, although the poor dogs are not happy with M's treasure trove and the cops do seem to drive by a lot more than they used to. Ah well. I don't think the roof is currently on fire. It will so suck if it is, since the dog ate the hose last week.

So Sunday morning, which would of course be yesterday, we got up and checked out of the motel, right on time at 10:00 am. We drove all the way to the tip of Folly Island towards the lighthouse, past where the surfers hang out and parked the car and walked along the beach and sat on this jetty for a while and contemplated some herbal goodness. I took pictures and N lay in the sun with his blinding white self (N is the only person in the world who is actually paler than me) and then we started getting a bit sunburnt, plus we were going to meet two old friends for brunch at noon, so we headed over to James Island. I was sitting on the porch with my old friend R to talk a bit when he asked me what time it was - and told me that the clocks had gone an hour ahead.

Oops. My poor friend H had been sitting at the restaurant where we were supposed to meet for brunch for an hour. He had even called and I hadn't heard the phone ring; then, when I listened to his message, I assumed that he had called me around 12 midnight, since as far as I was concerned it wasn't noon yet and I blithely completely spaced the time change. I'm now in terror that the motel is going to charge me for an extra night (they have strict cranky signs in the rooms about it) and last night it got terribly late terribly fast. I hate springing forward. I am not up to it. And without the computer, which sets itself, I'm apparently completely incapable of finding out the correct time.

Got to Charleston in record time on Saturday and proceeded to make the embarrassing classic tourist mistake and drive over the Cooper River bridge. They'll be taking away my citizenship now - but I'm still not used to the new bridge and the old bridge had a handy cut off to East Bay Street that I always used. Ah well; it wasn't hard to turn around and driving over the bridge is cool.

It was a good weekend. The memorial service was lengthy and moving and I only knew two people there; one of whom didn't remember me and one of whom I didn't manage to speak with. It's been a long, long time since I lived in Charleston and even though I still sort of think of it as home, it isn't, really. Not anymore. Thinking about that and all made me sad, but then we got on out to Folly and everything somehow was worth it. Several long walks on the beach; a fried seafood platter at Bowen's Island and brunch with two old close friends West Ashley: it was pretty much a perfect two days. Now I'm exhausted as I always am after a road trip but a lot got ironed out, somehow, this weekend, and I feel better. Or I will when I get some sleep. But in the meantime, though, there's some kind of closure now on a whole bunch of levels.

Friday, March 09, 2007

I have nothing new under the sun to report. Tomorrow morning I'm leaving for Charleston but only for a short trip; I'll be back Sunday night. I took this picture while stuck in traffic on Haywood Road, which is not interesting enough to blog about and then I went to the Westville and drank a couple of beers with my friend S and then I came home and had a fight with M and made dinner and drank a few more beers and, momentarily, I am going to go and pack a bag for the weekend, keeping in mind that Charleston is dressier than Asheville.

I'm going to a memorial service for my old friend Michael Tyzack, who was my professor when I was an art major at the College of Charleston, who taught me about paint and color and how you should take care of your brushes. A couple of years later, when he was on a sabbatical year in NYC, living in a Soho loft, we dated for several months. And then we didn't anymore and I went on and lived my life and he lived his and there was no contact. Then, a little bit after I moved here and was working at the art museum, a card came announcing a retrospective of his at the College gallery, where, in other news, I did my work study stint in college, hanging shows and arranging gallery attendants and, incidentally, firing my friend D, who is still a friend of mine and still prone to always being late.

So I went to Charleston to Michael's show, because I hadn't seen him in so very long and he was overwhelmingly happy to see me. Michael was an Englishman who never lost his inimitable British accent and some of the stories he told me I still am telling, like the one where he went at age 15 with his Irish uncle to a bar in Dublin and, when asked to order a drink, ordered Scotch because he had never ordered a drink before but had heard his father do it. Silence fell, and his uncle said, "You're in Ireland and you'll drink Jamesons." And so, he did.

He watched me standing by a window once and said, almost surprised, "Do you know, you're really quite extraordinarily beautiful right now." "Yes," I said, since I was gutsier then and naked, "Yes, I know." And he laughed and probably pulled me back to bed. When I saw him in Charleston those five or so years ago I said, "Do you remember how we broke up? Because I can't, and it's bothering me." "Oh," he said, "We just faded away." And I guess we did. He was happy as hell to see me then and I was happy to see him and we went for a drink which was lovely and I would have stayed with all the people for dinner but I was underdressed (which is, I believe, where I started with this) because I had come down from Asheville in, god help me, jeans and probably hiking boots, to re-encounter downtown Charleson in all their finery and I felt dowdy and young and foolish, which is often how I felt with Michael, and so I begged off. We fought about that when I was dating him and finally he took me to a dinner party at Sean Scully's loft and I was, alas, dowdy and young and foolish and ignored. And now I am going to his memorial service: still dowdy, still foolish but not so young.

Damn.

Note. After rereading this a couple of days later I want to make sure it's clear that it was only me and my insecurity (and my reprehensible taste in clothes) that made me feel dowdy and/or foolish. Michael never did; he was great.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

This is from a stump at the park this morning and, as often with macros, I'm just blown away by all the sort of painterly abstraction and color and so on. Yeah. Also, I went out while doing the laundry and had a few beers with J at the Westville and I can't see anyway and, well, let's just say it's a bit difficult to type right now. Which is okay. Yes. I guess.

There was a lovely beagly dog named Forrest at the Westville who was wandering around happily. He kept going into the kitchen, which evoked yells of "Forrest! Out!" from the cooks, but it was so nice. A restaurant kitchen is like heaven on earth for a dog and really, all kitchens should have dogs in them. I like businesses that have animals, from the fish market around the corner from my East Village apartment in the late 80s that had the healthiest, most beautiful, sleekest big black cat I have ever seen to Lexington Avenue Books & News, where, as all Ashevillains know, Retail the cat holds court on the counter. But, see, cats are unfairly overrrepresented in businesses, and actually dogs are great in them as well, if not better. Once in Maryland I went to cut down a Christmas tree at Doyle's Tree Farm, which was actually around the corner from where I used to live, and their resident dog pinned down all my kids, one by one, and licked their faces thoroughly. You just can't pay for that kind of customer service.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

And this is today's spring-y picture of the day, deceptively optimistic. Actually I took it when I went outside to smoke a cigarette and kind of get away a little from the boys dorm that my house has become. I know, I like this and I asked for it but still, it makes me sad when everyone is all having fun and when I poke my head in they either tell me to go put on my burqa (that would be my charming, lovely son) or they all shut up and look at me expectantly like puppies waiting for news of dinner. Also, I'm tired of everything always being a mess. I know, I need to put my foot down but then you know, I've never been any good at confrontations or, god forbid, discipline. I'd be okay with it all if they'd just let me play, anyway.

Actually I have a lot of thougts about teenage boys and this generation and the fear of sex - the way that they've been told since birth that sex is a deadly scary thing that can kill you has, I think, messed them up a little. Or maybe teenage boys have always been afraid of women and I just never noticed it before. Or maybe my other theory, which is that it's actually women who think about sex all the time and not men, is being proven correct. I don't know. These kids are more comfortable with hardcore violence on the screen (American History X) than kinky sex (Lair of the White Worm;) that's for sure. They would now jeer and tell me that Lair of the White Worm is just a sucky movie, granted. And I think that M's current fascination with Islamic terrorists has a lot to do with attempting to assert control of the women in his life. At which point he would jeer and say, that no, it isn't, and besides, Muslims don't oppress women, that's a western fabrication (this is untrue) and then I would realize that, after alll, this is the most taboo, rotten thing he can think of to get involved in and the one that is guaranteed to push all my buttons simultaneously. So that may have more to do with it than anything else. Still. When I was in my teens and early 20s all I wanted to do was get high and have sex, not necessarily in that order, and so did all my friends. These kids seem shy of it somehow, but probably I am extrapolating a trend where none exists. It's hard to say.

And I grant you it may just be that the den mother, which is me, should not know of such things, ever, ever, ever. This is quite possible.

Here is yesterday's photo, which occurred purely by accident as I was trying to set the thrice damned self timer so as to take a photo of my newly hot pink/purple/red red hair and my newly somewhat trimmer waistline (the stress & trauma diet can work for YOU, too! Ask me for details!) but I can never figure it out and anyway, I ended up with this somewhat vertiginious shot of me and my bedroom, complete with attractive towel action on the closet door there. Yes, I only have beach towels, because I like them & they are cheap & practical.

Yesterday. Hmmm, what happened yesterday? The recently very erratic cable internet was down and we watched American History X, which was depressing as hell and then I went and had a few beers at Broadways with my friend J which was actually very, very good, because I confessed to an evil deed of mine and she doesn't, after all, hate me forever. I always think everyone hates me forever and then, sometimes, miraculously, it turns out they don't. I have no idea why but I'm very, very glad that it's so.

Monday, March 05, 2007

Construction shots - whatever will I do for a daily picture when they finish this park project? Oh wait - I'm only doing a photo a day for one year, no worries. I do wonder what Bele Chere is going to be like this year, though, I must say.

Other than that, well, no news is good news, I guess. My dogs are being more disgusting than usual, which is to say that Theo seems to be feeling springlike and getting in touch with his inner gay bar habitue and Django is, quite naturally, the object of his affections. It is true that we cut his balls off and then put him in a yard with another guy, while the only girls in the neighborhood are securely trapped behind a neighboring fence. It is unfair, I grant you. Still, there's a whole lotta licking going on. It's kind of offputting when you see that, yet you don't want to stifle their individuality and freedom of expression (I'm a liberal. We all talk like that.) and yet you just know that at 6:45 tomorrow morning that same tongue is going to be enthusiastically exploring your nose. I mean, ewwwwww.

Every time I open a pack of cigarettes (which I'm doing waaay too often right now) I take out a cigarette, turn it upside down and put it back in. Then I smoke it last and make a wish. Usually, actually, I don't really bother with the wish, or I wish something dumb and facetious, like, "Hope I don't get cancer!" Ha ha. Cigarettes are funny! They kill you slowly! Today, though, I went to smoke my wish cigarette and I seriously considered my wish options. "I hope it all works out," I thought "I wish that things work out." Then I thought, well, you should probably be more specific and anyway, things do work out. Time goes on and things change and they dig up all of downtown Asheville and so on; jobs change and houses and everything, in a way, kind of works out. Or at least gets submerged in time. It just doesn't usually really work out to one's satisfaction, you know, in the way that evil gets punished and the righteous or at least the heroine, in this case me, rides off into the sunset with the cute guy.

Thus I realized that this was a dumb and impossible wish and I had damn well better wish for something concrete instead. So I wished for a purse that doesn't slide off my shoulder constantly. I even, at one point in my life, fantasized briefly about having surgery to put a small hook on my shoulder bone to hold a purse in place. Anyone who has ever been holding a cardboard cup of coffee in one hand and a bunch of other things in the other hand and had her purse whump down off her shoulder onto her forearm, thus spilling the coffee, will sympathize. A purse that stays on my shoulder; yes, that's what I'm wishing for.

Unfortunately I might as well wish for things to work out, because I think the odds are similar.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

So I sat in my room and made some art today, since M & A are furious at each other for some undeclared reason that I don't want to know and have been more or less at each other's throats all day. It's a drag. N & I & poor C, M's friend who has been here all weekend, are kind of tiptoeing around and it makes my head hurt. Young M, having been raised by wolves, which is to say, le loup-garou, c'est moi, is really kind of intolerable right now. Gods save us from the perfection of 15 year olds, who are quick to expose hypocrisy where they find it (which is everywhere, sheesh) and hold grudges.

Also, the guys are all on the computers harassing people on myspace all day and night and playing weird Islamic music, so I had to retreat somewhere. My daughter says, "How can you live like this?" and she has a point, but actually, I have always kind of enjoyed being Wendy. It's a terrible failing, this fondness for lost boys, but oh well, it is what it is.

As for where the image comes from, your guess is as good as mine. My head, obviously, but I don't claim to understand it either. It's some kind of pieta, that much is clear, but who and why and when and where are left up to you.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

The wind at Max Patch today was like nothing I've ever experienced, and I've been for walks in the wake and edge of hurricanes. It nearly knocked me flat, a couple of times, and my ears are still kind of ringing seven hours later. My friend S. gave up and retreated a bit behind the bald for some protection; I tried to get to the absolute top of Max Patch and couldn't even make it all the way. That sounds so ridiculous, and it was, but it's true: I couldn't get to the top of Max Patch. I thought the wind was literally going to blow me off the side of the world. It was fantastic. It was amazing. It was like, well, nothing, because I don't think there is anything that quite compares to trying to stand up in that kind of wind on top of a mountain on a blue, blue day. It was 70 mph winds hitting you from every side until you can barely stand, with your hair completely standing out on end from your head (I think I have dreads now. So that's where they come from.) Wind like that blows all thought out of your head. It was great.

1. The daffodils are blooming a good two weeks earlier this year than last year. 2. Repo Man is possibly my most favorite movie ever but I always forget about it when I'm compiling one of those stupid internet top movies list. Why is this?3. I'm going out to Max Patch and Hot Springs for the rest of the day.4. My fucking teeth still hurt. This sucks.5. Free good coffee at Earthfare this morning.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Another rough day. Anxiety is a monster sometimes; it's like being in a horror movie called The Creeping Dread. There's nothing out there but you're terrified anyway: Blair Witch project, urban variety. I think maybe the fish oil and the antique lexapro are not getting along well or something. Or possibly I'm going to feel like this forever, in which case I anticipate going shrieking mad fairly soon, which I'm looking forward to greatly. But it's okay now. It's okay at home (well, Emily Post and Heloise would disagree with me there, to say nothing of Drs. Spock and Freud.)

The moon is amazing tonight and the furnace is fixed and my tooth doesn't hurt as badly as it did yesterday. It is going to fix itself which may be empirical proof that a consortium of interested nature spirits does in fact exist, since I was all about the "Look, gods, make the tooth problem not exist, please, I cannot deal with this right now," and it (cross your fingers) seems to be going away. Of course, it would be nice if it had gone away before I went to the dentist and spent money with more money yet to come. Fucking Buncombe County took a bunch of money out of my bank account, too, because of overdue car tax that I could have sworn I paid; I can't believe they just reached in and got it and charged me $50 for the insult to boot.

Listen, y'all. Thank you for all the warm thoughts and the nice emails and the general good vibes. I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart - in fact, remind me to always have my nervous breakdowns on the internet, because the support is awesome. I am going to be okay, eventually, and even though I'm kind of a mess right now, I'm essentially sane underneath. At least I think I am. Some may disagree, but I swear there is, under the madness, some common sense and some calm and all that good stuff. Also, remember that this blog is kind of catharsis at work - I unload it here so I'm not carrying it around everywhere. So don't worry about me. I'm taking a time out, which is why I'm not answering my phone, but I will answer emails. . . and I'm going to work. . . and I'm doing mundane shit like the laundry. It's okay.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

The sixtieth day of the year and I spend it in the dentists' office, discovering that yet again, I have managed to defy normalcy by the literal skin of my teeth which are seemingly quite healthy yet painful as hell nevertheless. Possibly one is cracked. Possibly there's an abscess starting. Or, possibly, and this is the one I want you to go out and sacrifice a goat to the deity of your choice for, it is just a weird thing that will go away all on its own. Who knows? I have weird teeth. I have always had weird teeth and possibly I may even have bored you at some point with the story of the weirdness of my teeth.